James Hoffa Jr. is head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union.

Acting against the interests and perhaps the wishes of the majority of his union’s private-sector members, Hoffa has come out in support of voting “no” on Ohio’s Issue 2, and has actively campaigned towards that end:

Jim Hoffa, the head of the national Teamsters union and son of the infamous Jimmy Hoffa, made a stop in Toledo Wednesday night and he had powerful words for Gov. John Kasich.

Hoffa rallied Toledo-area union members Wednesday afternoon to vote no on Issue 2 on Nov. 8.

His visit to Toledo was his fourth trip to Ohio related to Ohio Issue 2 / Senate Bill 5.

… “My friends here in Ohio told me what Gov. Kasich said when he took over,” Hoffa said. “I understand that he said, ‘Get on the bus, or I’m going to run you over!’ Well, Gov. Kasich, we got a big truck out there and now we’re going to run you over!”

… “Collective bargaining is basically instrumental. It’s almost part of the First Amendment of the Constitution. You should have that right, all employees of Ohio should have that. They have for years and years and years until John Kasich comes in and tries to take it away.”

That was four visits as of mid-October.

The violent rhetoric of the second-last excerpted paragraph and the obvious misrepresentation seen in the final one — Issue 2′s passage will NOT “take away” collective bargaining — have been Hoffa’s stock in trade of late. He employed both two months ago in a Labor Day speech in Detroit on behalf of the reelection efforts of President Barack Obama:

Transcript:

Hoffa: We’ve got to keep an eye on the battle that we face, a war on workers. And you see it everywhere. It is the Tea Party. And y’know there’s only one way to beat and win that war.

The one thing about working people is, we like a good fight. And you know what? They got a war, they got a war with us, and there’s only gonna be one winner, it’s going to be the workers of uh Michigan and America! We’re gonna win that war!

– (snip) –

President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. And President Obama, we want one thing: Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs! That’s what we’re going to tell him.

He’s going to be, and, when he sees what we’re doing here, he will be inspired, but he needs help. And you know what, everybody here’s gotta vote. If we go back, keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong. Thank you very much!

The following is the official statement from Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa issued today about the Occupy Wall Street protest:

“No one should be surprised that Occupy Wall Street is gaining support and spreading quickly around the country. The American Dream has disappeared for students, whose reality is debt and unemployment. The dream disappeared for workers forced to take wage cuts by employers sitting on billions of dollars in profits. The dream disappeared for working families who paid too steep a price for Wall Street’s greed, stupidity and fraud.

The Teamsters have thus endorsed a movement I describedin my PJ Media column todayas all too often “nothing more than potty-mouthed, violent hooligans with an incoherent cause,” steeped in violence, incivility, hostility, and crime. As of this afternoon, John Nolte at BigJournalism.com has chronicled what is surely only a partial list of 119 incidents.

When the Occupy movement is semi-coherent, it among other things calls for a general strike in the city where even the left-wing Mother Jones noted that Occupiers and not the police were the ones who brought on violence, brags of its solidarity with their “Comrades from Cairo” (which isn’t exactly working out so well for “democracy” or tolerance), and tries to stop all “fracking,” which if allowed has the potential to end most of this country’s dependence on foreign energy sources and in the process would likely create the “jobs” Mr. Hoffa shouted for eight times above for some of his and other private-sector unions’ members.

Those are really special people with whom you have associated yourself and your union, Jimbo.

‘No’ On Ohio Issue 2 = Obama’s Agenda = Occupy Wall Street

It isn’t just conservatives who recoil from this. Sensible Ohioans — Democrats, Republicans, and independents — need to react accordingly at the voting booth in the coming days, and vote “Yes” on Issue 2.

Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in October for the 27th consecutive month, and the overall economy grew for the 29th consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.

“The PMI registered 50.8 percent, a decrease of 0.8 percentage point from September’s reading of 51.6 percent, indicating expansion in the manufacturing sector for the 27th consecutive month. The New Orders Index increased 2.8 percentage points from September to 52.4 percent, indicating a return to growth after three months of contraction. The Prices Index, at 41 percent, dropped 15 percentage points, and is below the 50 percent mark for the first time since May 2009 when it registered 43.5 percent. Inventories decreased to 46.7 percent, which is 5.3 percentage points below the September reading of 52 percent. Comments from respondents are mixed, indicating positive relief from raw materials pricing and continuing strength in a few industries, but there is also more concern and caution about growth in this uncertain economy.”

Of 18 industries reporting, eight reported expansion, six had contraction, and four were neutral.

Business Insider’s email had a prediction of 52.0, as did Bloomberg, as did Reuters.

The Production component of the index hung on to expansion by a thread, coming in at 50.1.

We’ll take expansion, obviously, but given all of the people looking for work, a much more robust version is needed.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Thursday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

________________________________________

Elaborating: As to why the column’s title is correct, the sub-head explains: “Even Obama’s people say so.”

Proof that this is the case is in the following email from Organizing For America on October 21:

All ordinarily sensible teachers, police, fire and other public-sector workers who have bought Issue 2 opponents’ lies should note that a vote against Issue 2 really is a vote for Obama’s agenda. “Even Obama’s people say so.”

Additionally, I will show in the coming days that a vote against Issue 2 is a vote for those who have orchestrated, supported, and participated in the “Occupy” movement.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

___________________________________

Merrill Matthews at Forbes (“Obama: Campaigning Like It’s 1936″) — “The lesson Obama should be learning from the 1936 election is that FDR’s Wealth Tax and class warfare set the economic recovery back years. Obama’s effort to channel FDR’s policies and reelection success would have exactly the same impact.” With Obama, one can’t be sure if that would be considered a bug or a feature.

Insight lost on others: Larry Kotlikoff, with whom your truly has worked intermittently during the past year for PJ Media, observed on October 20that Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would increase taxes on the wealthy who don’t report much income or whose income is predominantly capital gains and dividends. In that sense, a consumption tax replacing an income tax is fairer, and it certainly is not “regressive” with respect to them. With respect to income-earners, Kotlikoff’s says is regressive at the low end. But that’s largely because it takes away things like the Earned Income Credit, which could be solved by employing the Fair Tax’s “prebate” or by simply exempting a base level of annual purchases before the sales tax kicks in.

Lori Montgomery at the Washington Post could have saved her employer a lot of paper and bandwidth by replacingwhat she wrote about “How Social Security went ‘cash negative’ earlier than expected” with the following words: “In about June 2008,the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economybegan.”

At BigJournalism.com: “Occupy Wall Street: The Rap Sheet. So Far.” Author John Nolte is ups to 110 incidents. He’s grading on a curve.

Bill Gates, as noted by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters: “You Can’t Raise the Taxes We Need Just By Going After That One Percent.” Good to know that a Windows guy knows more about budgetary realities (i.e., math) than our arrogant “It’s math” president.

At the Hill: “Second Energy Department-backed company goes bankrupt.” That company would be Beacon Power Corp., which ” received a $43 million Energy Department loan guarantee last year.” But Jonathan Alter will probably continue to insist that the Obama administration, of which the Energy Department is a component agency, is “free of scandal.” Sure.

Related to the previous item, one of many stories from the UK possibly foreshadowing things to come here (“Britain Pulls Plug On Green Energy Boondoggle”):

Hundreds of solar companies are likely to go bust by Christmas after the Department for Energy and Climate Change confirmed it is looking to halve subsidies for new panels.

Greg Barker, minister for climate change, said the “feed-in tariff” subsidies are currently too generous, because the cost of installing solar panels has fallen.

A Texas man is happy he can hold is grandchildren again after an experimental surgery to reconnect his severed arm, reports WFAA in Dallas.

In late August, Royce Reid, 49, was injured in an accident at work, which severed his left arm. It took hours to transfer him and his arm from a hospital in Longview, Texas, to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, and on the trip, the Navy veteran nearly bled to death.

Dr. Bardia Amirlak, the University of Texas Southwestern plastic surgeon who was on call at the Parkland trauma center when Reid arrived, said that long trip lowered the chances that Reid’s arm would be successfully reattached.

“When the muscles start to die, you cannot put the arm back on,” he told WFAA.

Although it had been seven hours since Reid’s arm was severed, Amirlak decided to try to give Reid his arm back. In an experimental procedure, Amirlak used blood from Reid’s own leg to restore oxygen to the amputated arm.

“We hooked a tube up to the artery in leg, and took it outside his body and transfused it directly into his arm to keep it alive,” Amirlak explained to WFAA. “We did that while we are working on his bones and the blood vessels to keep the muscle alive.”

Two months later, Reid is undergoing rehabilitation and is gradually regaining the use of his hand.

To reattach severed limbs, doctors perform microsurgery, a form of plastic surgery in which they reconnect bone, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. The delicate operation takes hours, and patients must go through months of rehabilitation to regain feeling and use of their limbs. …

In an unbylined item Sunday evening, the Associated Press informed readers that Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chavez, continuing a six-year campaign of agricultural land seizures, has ordered the expropriation of a huge swath of farmland from a British company, and unilaterally decided that any compensation which might occur will be paid in his country’s own currency, over which the country’s banks exercise strict repatriation controls.

The report frames the amount of land being seized in a way which will ensure that many readers won’t appreciate its massive scope. More important, in something seen frequently in reports about authoritarian regimes, it treats the specific objections of opponents — in this case, current landowners — as arguments instead of observable and determinable facts. Here are several paragraphs from the report (bolds are mine):

z Pol-Party-Lobby Sites z

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